3 - Anxious Romance: The Roman d'Alexandre, the Roman de Troie, and Cligès

Summary

The previous chapter highlighted some of the literary and political contexts in which the Latin Alexandreis participates in the later twelfth century, and the characteristic issues with which that text is preoccupied. The transnational nature of the Alexandreis’ concerns poses the question as to whether its poetics of translatio are found in that work alone, or whether they are a wider feature of Alexander's multifaceted textual history; in other words, can similar issues, and poetics, be found in other Alexander texts of this date, texts that may have distinctively different origins and may be composed in other languages? To answer this, I shall consider the literary and political identities of a contemporary French-language romance Alexander work, the Roman d'Alexandre, which was compiled c. 1180 or shortly thereafter by Alexandre de Paris, and therefore offers a particularly important comparison for the Alexandreis since its translatio studii is performed in parallel with that text. I shall go on to compare other contemporary romances with the Roman d'Alexandre in order to contexualize its poetics. Focusing on the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, one of the three romans d'antiquité – with Thèbes and Eneas – dating from the middle of the twelfth century (c. 1150–65) that share stylistic and antique themes with the Alexandre, and Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès, a text that is explicitly concerned with translatio studii, I shall argue that, just as Latin translatio studii is not monolithic, neither is that of texts en romanz. From this perspective, the Roman d'Alexandre, and in particular the debate about translatio studii in which it participates, extends Alexander's impact beyond the immediate literary, political, and geographical contexts of the French text in a similar fashion to, but with a different viewpoint from, the Alexandreis. This comparative analysis will aid our understanding of Alexander as a local and/or a wider literary phenomenon in these contexts.

Courtly Contexts and Textual Connections

In the course of the previous chapter, I briefly outlined the multilingual and multicultural context of the Alexandreis before focusing on that context from a Latin perspective. Here, I want to consider the vernacular aspects of the literary landscape of the 1170s and 1180s in northern France and Angevin territories, bringing into play the other side of the linguistic coin, in order to understand what the relationships might be between the Latin Alexandreis and other Alexander texts.